Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Legal Journals Blogs -> Harvard International Law Journal Digest

Legal Journals

: Harvard International Law Journal Digest

ICTY Appeals Chamber Reduces Dragomir Milosevic?s Sentence to 29 Years

By eatkinson

The Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) reduced the sentence for former Bosnian Serb army general Dragomir Milosevic from 33 to 29 years on Thursday. The tribunal found that the trial court had erred in its 1997 ruling and that there was insufficient evidence that Milosevic had ordered three shellings of civilians during his command of the siege of Sarajevo from 1994 to 1995.

Milosevic was a commander of the Bosnian Serb Army’s Sarajevo Romanija Corps (SRK), which laid siege to Bosnia?s capital, Sarajevo, for 44 months prior to the end of the Bosnian Conflict in November 1995. During the siege, which was the longest blockade in Europe since the end of WWII, snipers from the SRK routinely shot at civilians and troops shelled the city. Estimates by human rights organizations put the number of civilians killed at 10,000, approximately 1,500 of whom were children. Milosevic assumed command of the SRK from Stanislav Galic in August 1994 and held that position for fifteen months until the conflict’s end. Galic, the only criminal convicted of war crimes to have received a sentence of life imprisonment on appeal from the ICTY, was sentenced in November 2006.

Milosevic was indicted in 1998 and surrendered to the ICTY in 2004. He was convicted in 2007 of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, inhumane acts, and acts of terror. Milosevic had appealed his 2007 conviction, while the prosecution had requested that the tribunal increase his sentence to life imprisonment. His appeal was heard this July, and the Appeals Chamber’s decision was announced on Thursday, November 12.

The Appeals Chamber found that there was not sufficient evidence to draw the inference that Milosevic ordered the sniping of civilians during the siege, or that he specifically ordered three shelling attacks on certain civilian sites. The tribunal did find, however, that Milosevic was nonetheless responsible for failing to stop and punish the crimes of his troops, and that he encouraged the commission of crimes against civilians through ?maintaining and intensifying the campaign directed at the civilian population in Sarajevo.? It therefore reclassified his convictions for planning and ordering the sniping of the civilian population with a conviction, under Article 7(3) of the ICTY Statute, for failing to prevent and punish the crimes of his subordinates. The Appeals Chamber held that although the reclassification of Milosevic’s sniping convictions did not itself warrant a reduction of his sentence, the reversal of his convictions for the shelling incidents did have a limited impact on his over culpability. Dismissing the prosecution’s appeal entirely, the court accordingly reduced Milosevic’s sentence to 29 years. Judge Lia Daqun issued a partial dissent regarding the crime of terror conviction and certain sentencing issues.

Milosevic, 67, is no relation to the late Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic

For more information, please see here and here.

Full post as published by Harvard International Law Journal Digest on November 13, 2009 (boomark / email).